The hope was I'd convince them that someone who believes the National Health Service should be offering medical astrology, remote psychic healing and homeopathy might not be the best person to return to a position of power.

Today the Royal Society will publish the first report based on its Atlas of Islamic-World Science and Innovation Project. The reason we have chosen to undertake this project is the potentially staggering impact that countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others could have on science in the coming decades.

The Islamic world has a rich scientific tradition but in more recent times has fallen behind. In 2005, 17 Arab speaking countries put together produced fewer scientific papers than Harvard University. This will all change with the commitment - both financial and ideological - to a new wave of scientific endeavour.

This piece is taken from John Cadogan's address to the Society's first meeting.

Universities are there to push back the frontiers of knowledge. They are there to bring the best out of people: to produce people who can think the unthinkable, who will challenge belief with knowledge, who will heed the Royal Society's motto "nullius in verba" - "take nobody's word for it".

Frankly, the universities have much to do here and history has given us many examples of lack of vision by those at the top:

Alexander Graham Bell: "One day in the future every manufactory in the United States will have a telephone."

Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the UK Post Office, in 1876: "This new telephonic apparatus may be all well and good for our colonial cousins but it will never catch on in Great Britain because we have an adequate supply of messenger boys."

Preece again, in 1886: "If growth in telephonic communication continues at the current foreseen rate by the year 2000, every woman of working age in the United Kingdom will have to be a telephone operator."

Fortunately there's an induction programme to take them through everything they need to know, from where the canteen is to how to get a parliamentary email account. This year, for the first time, science was on the agenda too.

The idea came about when Adam Afriyie, the shadow science spokesperson in the last parliament, asked POST to run training sessions for new Conservative MPs, covering everything from the scientific method to the use and abuse of statistics.

POST has seen five new parliaments and two changes of government since it was created in 1990. This was the first time anyone had suggested we should organising training for new MPs, so we were keen to take it on, as long as it was open to MPs from all parties.

Planning the event was quite a challenge: how should we pitch it so that it didn't patronise new MPs who already knew something about science, but at the same time did not go straight over the heads of non-scientists?

Cuts have been made in infrastructure of vital strategic interest: the kind of heavyweight computing that underpins a range of science, from cosmology to biology to medicine, along with research with a global impact.

To my mind, the fact that this study was mentioned in parliament, and the statement that homeopathy can kill cancer cells is now a matter of public record, is a spectacular failure. But it is not a failure of politics or politicians: it is a failure of science.